


Topple the House of Flesh

by TheseusInTheMaze



Category: Beowulf (Poem)
Genre: Dark Month, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:30:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheseusInTheMaze/pseuds/TheseusInTheMaze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We were here first."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Topple the House of Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dark Month, inspired by my homework. Who knew, huh? Title comes from the original poem.

We were here first.

Don’t listen to what the other ones say, because they are wrong. We were here first. 

They say that they improved this place, but they didn’t. They took their flimsy iron axes to our trees and they took the wooden corpses and built up an ugly thing that squatted on the beach. Their fires turned the air smoky, and they themselves filled the land with the stink of dead fish and mortality. 

They were ugly things, and they were cruel. You don’t need to know all the ways they were cruel, except that they claimed that we were cruel. We were not cruel. We were ourselves, and we followed our laws. It was their own fault for not knowing them. 

I loved my son. I will not say I loved him as all mothers love their sons, because not all mothers love their sons. But I loved him. He was not beautiful, but he was mine, and he was taken from me.

Do you understand that? Can you wrap your strange, flat mind around that? I made him, out of mud and blood and pain and tears and me, and it was so easy for that man to destroy him. So, so easy. He was my baby, and he was killed by a man. 

I was beautiful in my day, although not by your standards. Your kind, all the same – two legs, two arms, two eyes. The same faces, the same shapes, the same everything. You swarm over our land like ants without the camaraderie, like rats shorn of their intelligence, like deer stripped of their grace. But I… I was beautiful, and much sought after. I was the one who stalked the snowy nights and sang to the stars, and the stars sang back to me. 

I shaped him with my own hands, and I was the one who saw him drag himself into my den, the last of his blood sinking into the water, where the beasts that swam and crawled trailed after it, tasting his pain and my despair. 

It was never my idea to go and harry those man-creatures. Let the world kill them – let them die in the frost and the fires and the deep, dark sea. They were an aberration as it was, and they had killed enough of the children of my fellows to build their halls and fill their bellies and make their sport. But my son – my beautiful baby – he seethed and paced and snarled. The hatred and the rage boiled out of him, and they changed my baby into something else, something I didn’t know, but I still loved him, because he was mine. And it was that strange creature, shaped by hate and rage that would storm off into the mist and the mud every night. 

You changed him. It was your sheer wrongness that turned him into the foul thing he died as. But he died as my son, and he died with me beside him, my hands on his clammy skin, staring at the place where his arm once was. You were so proud of that, weren’t you? Proud of pulling his arm off, so proud you nailed it over the flimsy door that my son ripped open, night after night. It is your fault that my son died as he did, an ugly, hateful thing, terrified and pained and full of rage.

But not alone. 

Do not turn your ugly face away from me, you miserable creature – I loved my son, and he did not die alone. My hands were on his body, and I felt the life leave it – I felt the little bit of myself that was part of what made him wither like a dead tree. I felt the pain of it in my gills and in my gut and between my ears and across my skin, like the soot of the men’s fires or the greasiness of their shit. 

The rage that built in me was huge, nothing you will ever understand, far beyond the scope of your minds or your dreams. It was – is – the rage of the volcano, the fury of the sea. I left my son in our den at the bottom of the lake and the beasts, those I had fought and ignored in turns, followed me; they wailed their grief into the duckweed and the pond scum and it oozed it through my pores, puddling in the footsteps I left in the soft mud of the riverbank.

I had never been so close to the hall of men before, the place made of the corpses of the trees. It was an ugly, hulking thing, and it stank of death and of smoke and shit and vomit. It was like a blow to the face, and it joined the grief that was knotted up in my gut, throbbing like a broken tooth. 

I broke the door open, and it was easy. It was all easy – easy to slit one of the men from forehead to groin with the tip of my claw. His entrails slid out in a slippery, foul smelling mess. Their bones offered less resistance than those of the wild pig I would hunt. Their skin tore like dead leaves. It was easy to make my way through them, their blood soaked up in the dead plants strewn about the ground. I was blind with grief and rage, their scent gagging me in its foulness, their blood congealing on my claws. 

The story they tell now doesn’t talk about all that I killed – the way of men is to make themselves look bigger. I tried to kill every man in that place made from the corpses of the trees. I fear that I did not. The disgusting scent of their offal and my own rage disguised the few who hid like rabbits. The story says I took one man and removed his head, left it on a cliff like some kind of prize. 

The story lies.

I do not take trophies. I am not that cruel. I am not a man. 

I do not take pleasure from the suffering of vermin. I merely exterminate it. I should have done that a long time ago. 

According to the story, the hero jumped into the lake and swam for almost a day, covered in the beaten metal they use to protect their frail flesh. It says he fought the creatures that live in the lake, which at the time were still crazed with grief and sorrow. The story says that the hero found me in my den with the body of a man and the body of my son, surrounded by treasure. As if I would pollute my home with that filth – as if I would allow it near the body of my beloved son. The wretched thing my baby had become. And as if I care for the useless metal that men find so captivating. 

He dragged himself into my den, and he was panting, his teeth were showing savagely. He did not have any of his metal, only his bare hands and his stumpy white teeth and his ugly, flat face. He was singing. His voice lacked the sweet tones of the thunder, the low terror of the owl’s cry, the high companionship of the wolf’s howl, the lusty pride of the elk’s bugle. It was flat and high and it made my teeth itch for his throat. And I know now, that he was taunting me – an alien idea at the time, although now I am much more fully versed in the cruelty of men, I know it that much better.

“White lady, white lady,” he crooned in his flat, ugly voice, “I’m the one who killed your baby.” 

The story says that he found a special piece of metal, some kind of weapon, amongst the piles of useless metal. But there was no useless metal in my den – there was my dead son, and there were rocks, and there was me. And my rage – my rage at him, being so close to the body of my baby, my child that he himself killed. In my rage, I did not think. I just charged.

He had some of that useless metal tucked… somewhere. I do not know where. And he did not kill me – he cut off my hand. He was strong – a veritable specimen of the vermin’s best, in all of its ugly glory. But he did not cut off my head. He cut off my hand, and the pain of it and the shock of it sent me into a frenzy that I do not remember. I do not remember what happened, except that I woke up on the body of my son, and his head was removed, as is the custom of the men. I remember howling my grief, so loudly that that walls of my den trembled and the rocks came crashing down. 

A fitting burial for my son. Surrounded by the rock and the earth that I made him with, my blood mixed in.

Someday – someday soon – I am going to make him again. I have been in this lake for a very long time, and I have seen men come and go – the corpses of the trees caught fire, ages ago, and more men came, and bred like the vermin they are. And now, I am down under the lake. 

I’m going to come out very soon, with my son. My newly made son. 

And this time, I am going to put things back to the way they were at the beginning.

Because we were here first.


End file.
